The present invention relates generally to techniques for improving learning in people. More particularly, the present invention relates to improved techniques for diagnosing, predicting, and treating reading deficit in a person based on acoustical measurements.
Reading deficit (RD) is an impairment in the ability of a person to read, decode, and comprehend written words. Such an impairment often presents a serious obstacle to social and/or economic success. This is because deficiencies in reading skills, in addition to causing difficulties in comprehending written words and in learning, may lead to low self-esteem and/or a host of other learning-related social problems.
Fortunately, reading deficit often admits remediation although success rates of the various available method may vary considerably. If a person is identified as having a reading deficit, his reading skills may be improved using a variety of intervention techniques known in the art, such as training and/or therapy. Indeed, if susceptibility to reading deficit is detected sufficiently early, young children may, for example, be given supplemental training and/or therapy to strengthen the skills required for successful reading even before they reach their reading age. In this manner, these young children may undergo intervention programs early on and acquire sufficient skills to at least keep up with their peers by the time they start learning to read, thereby minimizing learning-related self-esteem and/or other related social problems.
In the prior art, there exists a variety of techniques for identifying whether a particular person suffers from reading deficit. However, these prior art techniques typically focus on formulating reading tests that can accurately ascertain whether a particular person is deficient in reading skills. For example, a person suspected of suffering from reading deficit may, according to one prior art technique, be asked to read one or more written passages from a standardized reading test. A comparison of the accuracy and/or reading rate of the test subject to the accuracy and/or reading rate of those deemed to be normal readers may then suggest whether that test subject may have reading deficit symptoms.
To screen individuals (children) before school age (and thus before reading instruction), there exist in the prior art a testing technique based on language skills called "phonological awareness," which is broadly defined as the ability to consciously break words into their constituent sounds (phonemes), to combine phonemes in order to form words, and to recognize certain speech-sound regularities such as rhyming. The ability to perform the aforementioned tasks has been shown to be related to current as well as future reading ability (with respect to age-appropriate levels).
Another test, termed "rapid naming," consists in the verbal report of the identity of a number of drawings of familiar objects and animals. The number of drawings that can be named in a predefined time interval (e.g., one minute) is believed to relate to the facility with which reading will likely be initiated. Other tests, such as memory, posture balance, attention, etc., have been employed to screen pre-school children for possible future reading problems.
Although such prior art techniques may, if properly designed and administered, be able to identify with a fair degree of accuracy those suffering from reading deficit, there are disadvantages. By way of example, the use of a reading test requires that the test subject be at least of reading age, i.e., old enough to read the written passages, and that the tests be normed separately for each language (to determine the expected performance levels of a normal reader). Accordingly, such reading tests are inapplicable for use in predicting reading deficit in pre-reading children, i.e., children who are too young to read, and they are also inapplicable for use with individuals of other linguistic backgrounds than the one the test is made in.
With respect to screening tests that do not require any degree of reading competence, such as the aforementioned language skills based tests, they disadvantageously require the constant supervision of a trained adult throughout the duration of test, because a human is required to administer and score every test component. Of course, the human supervisor must be competent in a child's (or adult test subject's) native language in order for the test results to be valid. Additionally, they require, as mentioned earlier, separately developing and norming the test battery for each possible target language, because language-based tests such as those of phonological awareness and rapid naming will have different items and different responses in each language.
In view of the foregoing, there are desired improved techniques for identifying, in a reliable manner, whether a particular person is likely to suffer from reading deficit. The improved reading deficit identifying techniques preferably employ testing methodologies that are capable of identifying reading deficit or the increased probability that such an impairment will develop even in test subjects who are of pre-reading age or who are non-native.